[IAEP] Teams!

[David Farning]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 12:51 PM, Greg Dekoenigsberg <gdk at redhat.com> wrote:

>
> On Sun, 9 Nov 2008, David Farning wrote:
>
>  Greg,
>>
>> Thanks for taking the time to put together the well though out list of
>> concrete improvement that we can make to the wiki.
>>
>
> Thanks David.  But to be clear here: I'm not fundamentally concerned with
> wiki improvements, per se.  I'm talking about team improvements.  If these
> teams are, in fact, teams, that how do we ensure that we are treating them
> as such?  A set of wiki pages is not a team.  A team is a group of people
> working together to accomplish a goal.  Each team's wiki pages should be a
> reflection of that reality.
>

Greg's assessment of the situation is correct, as it often is correct.  The
wiki is just community building tool, not the community itself.


>  First the credit.  I idea of teams came from SJ while we were discussing
>> the relationship between the SL and OLPC wikis.  I was talking about the
>> _best_ place to host different content.  SJ suggested that their was not a
>> best place.  Rather, he stated a lot of content fits in both places, just
>> from different _perspectives_.
>>
>> Hence, the idea of teams or sub communities tackling the Sugar Labs
>> mission from different angles.
>>
>> On stubs.  A wiki is an interesting collaborative tool.  The wiki's value
>> is ultimately as a source of information for readers.  Here we get to the
>> tricky part.  The wiki is of little value as a source of information until
>> it contains substantive, well written, and easily located articles.  But,
>> nobody wants to go through the bother of researching, writing, and
>> organizing the content until they feel there work would have an impact on
>> future readers.
>>
>> Several community theorists advocate 'worse is better' as a starting point
>> for generating initial content.  As long as a community starts with
>> 'something', that something can gradually improve until it becomes something
>> useful.
>>
>> FWIW, when we help the initial wiki barn raising about 6 months ago, we
>> were averaging (very roughly) about 2 wiki contributions per day.  Now we
>> are up to about 10 per day.  If we can stay on that rate of increase, we
>> will exceed 40 contributions per day in another 6 months.
>>
>
> I do not dispute any of this.  To be clear: my comments are almost
> completely orthogonal to the wiki.  The wiki is merely a tool.
>
> To be as simple and as blunt as possible: a team that does not have a
> leader, a task list with owners, and a regular meeting time, might as well
> not even exist.  We should either bring all of our teams up to speed, or do
> away with them.  My $0.02.
>


>
> FWIW, I would like to take over the marketing team, roll events into it,
> and start driving it -- which I will start to do next week.  Lest anyone
> think I'm just trying to make work for other people.  ;)
>

Great.  Marketing is pretty weak.


>
> --g
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